updated 04:53 pm EDT, Mon April 8, 2013

System long overdue for refresh

Apple is planning to announce a next-generation Mac Pro -- or a replacement -- sometime this month, a source tells MacDailyNews. No other information has emerged, but the website claims that the source has been right about other Apple products in the past. It did correctly predict the renaming of iPhone OS to iOS, and prices for iCloud subscriptions.

The Mac Pro is typically considered long overdue for a refresh. The last major update took place in 2010; a 2012 specification bump was so minor that Apple quickly removed the "New" tag next to the product at the online Apple store. CEO Tim Cook has also promised new hardware sometime this year. If the company is planning a replacement, though, it's unclear what if anything would be different, beyond improved performance.

smaller please

For the love of god, cut the size of the thing in half and give me a reasonably sized/priced desktop. All I want is something I can plug one or two cards into for extra (powered) USB slots and a better graphics card for TF2. If it's $2500 starting price again, I have to jump ship or do OSX86 I refuse to buy less and less accessible/repairable hardware for my desktop. If we can get a "server" in the form of an optical-free mini, we can have a prosumer desktop with at least SOME expandability.

It's already here

No matter what Apple does, people will complain. If it's still huge, people will complain it's still too huge. If it's smaller, people will complain there aren't enough internal expansion options.

I can see Apple doing several risky things: no optical drive bays, and SDD-only for internal storage. That's pretty much the only way to make this beast smaller. They might also reduce the number of expansion slots.

But this beast will always be priced for the Pro market. Don't expect anything cheaper than a $2000 machine.

Not just me,

Hi Sebastien, and as sad thing too.

With Apple abandoning the pros, both in OS development and hardware, users who need high end systems (and when you need an 16 core system you need it bad...) Are only left with MS Windows (and it's obsession of wasting the screen real estate of a desktop to turn it into a tablet), or the chaos that Linux is now becoming.

Yes, and 10.8 introduced a Firewire audio bug that bit a number of pros, including me. Except it was a LOT less serious and more easily worked around by driver updates than similar issues in earlier OS updates, back when Apple still cared about us. Some of them even made our external drives inaccessible, IIRC (memory is hazy - it's been such a long time since Apple cared and still introduced such nasties as they massively updated core technology).

It is such dark days for us, now that the OS development languishes and I am no longer able to work with it...why am I happier with it than I've ever been?

The number of professionals who actually need towers today — even media professionals — is vanishingly small.

The computing world has changed substantially and fundamentally in the past fifteen years.

Apple do just fine catering to the vast majority of "professionals", just like they always have. There is always a vocal slither of the market that Apple doesn't please. But you know, Apple has been neglecting the professional market quite consequently for at least fifteen years. Back then it was high-end rendering machines that had to be running Linux or Windows, due to Apple not caring. Today, it's high-end rendering machines that some people with their myopic perspective appear to equate with "The Pro Market" that Apple is neglecting. In ten years' time, it'll probably be high-end rendering machines that Apple, the bastards, simply aren't caring enough about.